SCCM Fast Ring–Good or Bad (hint….bad!)

Last week I noticed that a colleague of mine had upgraded their SCCM environment to 1706. This person manages well over 100,000 endpoints, so I figured 1706 was good to go. Nope!

First, a bit of information regarding fast ring and regular ring. Fast Ring for ConfigMgr is technically beta. This means that even though you can put it in your production environment, you might want to wait. Just like Windows 10 servicing, the Fast Ring will go production four months after the release. In between……well, therein lies the problem. You will most definitely get hotfixes every now and then while on Fast Ring, but you may also run into this:

“This update is available in the Updates and Servicing node of the Configuration Manager console for environments that were installed by using first wave (Fast Ring) builds of version 1706 downloaded between August 8 and August 11, 2017.” According to the product team, only about 50 SCCM infrastructures were affected. Guess who was part of the 50!

I installed SCCM 1706 on Friday August 11th. Thus, I fell into one of the 50 that needed the hotfix. Until today we were not able to install applications from the Software Center or OSD. That, as you can imaging, was bad!

Lesson learned: Perhaps don’t install SCCM Fast Ring unless you really really really need it and even then, be prepared for some issues from time to time until the release is full production.